YouTube Custom URL: Crafting A Good One

Ahhh, the often coveted YouTube custom URL. Every single YouTuber, and TGN Partner, wants this sweet, sweet option, as you get an awesome YouTube custom URL and you get to show off the level of prestige it grants. It’s also an extremely important decision for any YouTuber because your channel will be defined by this YouTube custom URL. If you mess this up, it’s with your YouTube channel for life.

It’s easier to create a YouTube customer URL than it is find the proper URL for your channel. This is why we’re going over some tips and tricks to make sure your custom URL doesn’t end up a bad one.

Eligibility For A YouTube Custom URL

First things first, your channel needs to be eligible to get a YouTube custom URL. Your channel needs to have 500 or more subscribers, be at least 30 days old, have an uploaded photo for the channel icon, have uploaded channel art, and, on top of all that, needs to be in good standing. If you meet all of these criteria, or are extremely close, then you can start thinking about your custom URL.

This is why the custom URL on YouTube is a sign of prestige; you must have at least 500 subs to be eligible. It’s an awesome milestone to reach, but also a daunting one, as this decision cannot be reversed once finalized.

Consider Your Primary Focus

The task of condensing your entire YouTube channel’s career into one simple URL can be quite the intimidating one, especially since there are no backsies. To make this decision easier, we have some tips for TGN Partners having trouble creating a custom URL for their particular corner of the internet.

If you thought creating a character was hard, you’re in for a real treat.

You’ll want to focus on the main theme of your channel. Whether that is one single game, or one style of gaming, is up to you, but if you are having trouble deciding on terms to use, words like gaming, gamer, MMO, shooter, FPS, RTS, and other abbreviations and acronyms can help add some uniqueness to your custom URL.

Nicknames are absolutely welcome, as long as they make sense to your fans a future potential followers. Nicknames that are overly obscure, or take a while to explain, can be detrimental. References and plays on words are encouraged, as well, just don’t make them vulgar or too long. Custom URLs should be short for the sake of brevity and ease of communication. Being able to quickly reference your channel’s URL is a very important factor to the success of your channel.

Custom URLs should be short for the sake of brevity,

and ease of communication, as being able to quickly reference

your channel’s URL is a very important factor for success.

As a last piece of advice, search for other channels like yours and see what kinds of words and references they are using. While imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, don’t outright steal someone else’s name, or name likeness. It’s bad form to copy someone, but not to use their ideas for inspiration.

Avoid These Classic Mistakes

And speaking of ideas you should avoid, we have several of those for our TGN partners, as well. First and foremost, for the love of all that is holy, do not use a bunch of random numbers after your name. Not only does this make it exceeding difficult to find your channel among the others on YouTube, but your followers are not going to be able to remember your name. Your YouTube custom URL is your name on YouTube, quite literally to some YouTubers, so you don’t want a whole bunch of random numbers cluttering it up. Not even your birthday.

Another problem content creators run into is making their YouTube custom URL far too long for anyone to remember it. Your custom URL is not your password; the less complicated it is, the better. Complications can come in the form of too many words, confusing acronyms, “creative” spellings, and basically anything that can confuse your viewers.

Using words like best, top, greatest, and other descriptors

to puff yourself up looks really bad when

you can’t back it up via subscriber numbers.

Don’t over inflate yourself with your custom URL. Using words like best, top, greatest, and other descriptors to puff yourself up looks really bad when you are actually not the best via subscriber numbers. We’re talking to the small channels with this one. It’s better to be truthful than try to pull in fake crowds. Your fans will last longer overall.

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While it can be an intimidating task to squish all of your content into one custom URL, we here at TGN want to help you feel a little less scared about it. As long as you avoid making the common mistakes above, we’re sure you’re going to have an awesome custom URL in no time. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next week, TGN partners!